New Judiciary chairman might drown in tidal wave

Friday

Dec 31, 2010 at 12:01 AM

Rep. Lamar Smith's pet cause is immigration enforcement. Now, as the chairman-elect of the House Judiciary Committee attempts to persuade fellow Republicans to join his posse, he has also taken an interest in Latino voting patterns.

Ruben Navarrette

Rep. Lamar Smith's pet cause is immigration enforcement. Now, as the chairman-elect of the House Judiciary Committee attempts to persuade fellow Republicans to join his posse, he has also taken an interest in Latino voting patterns.

Too bad he has such a limited understanding of both.

The San Antonio congressman can't match candlepower with Republicans such as Karl Rove, Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich. They are also thinking about Latino voting, and they worry that the GOP - through the immigration debate - is alienating an otherwise conservative audience with incendiary rhetoric and slogans.

According to the polling firm Latino Decisions, 71 percent of the votes cast by Latinos in the midterm elections went to Democratic candidates. And with recent census data showing that Latino drive population growth in Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Florida and other states, Republicans could be capsized by a demographic tidal wave.

Yet, instead of making peace, Smith is making up tall tales. In an op-ed for The Washington Post, he made the rosy claim that GOP-Latino relations were "very bright" in spite of warnings that "a pro-rule-of-law stand would undercut Hispanic support for Republicans."

Smith wants to reassure Republicans in Congress that they can act with impunity if they bash immigrants - of all kinds. Not simply an opponent of illegal immigration, he also supports limiting legal immigration. And he wants to change the 14th Amendment and deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants.

Hard-liners such as Smith get tangled in contradictions. They insist they're concerned only with "illegal immigration" and have no problem with legal immigrants - whom they also want to keep out. And they brag about being "pro-rule of law" right up to the point where they try to change laws with which they don't agree.

There is good news. Unlike demagogues such as Tom Tancredo - the former Colorado congressman who managed to enrage Cuban-Americans, a loyal GOP constituency, by calling Miami a "Third World country" - Smith hasn't been foolish enough to say outright racist things. Nor does he compare illegal immigrants to insects, as did Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, who insists authorities should be able to apprehend more illegal immigrants, because the government can "capture illegal grasshoppers from Brazil."

The problem with Smith is that he doesn't approach the immigration issue with honesty, nuance or sophistication. As when he says the Obama administration is making it "easier for illegal immigrants to keep jobs that rightly belong to U.S. citizens and legal immigrant workers."

This sounds like something you'd hear from a Democrat pandering to union workers in a Rust Belt state. Does a supposedly pro-business Republican really need to be reminded that U.S. jobs don't "rightly belong" to anyone but rather are earned by those willing to do them?

Smith doesn't grasp that the immigration issue is about economics and the need to replenish the U.S. labor supply, because young people are raised to think of themselves as entitled to avoid stoop labor. He thinks the whole problem can be solved by enforcement alone, even though the law enforcement professionals who do that work daily disagree and insist that there isn't a wall high enough to deter mothers and fathers who are desperate to feed their children.

Smith is tougher on some offenders than he is on others. He sounds like Dirty Harry when it comes to deporting illegal immigrants who can't vote and don't contribute to political campaigns, but he becomes Barney Fife when he has the chance to stiffen penalties on employers who do. The co-author of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which focused on enforcement, forgot to include a new round of employer sanctions in the mix.

Actually, he didn't forget. I interviewed Smith a couple of years after the law was passed, and I asked him why he hadn't come down harder on employers. He candidly acknowledged that it would have been a tough sell to fellow Republicans.

Now Lamar Smith is on another sales trip, peddling the snake oil that Republicans can do their worst and not pay a price with Latino voters.